Værløse, January 2008

Dear friends,

As usually we’re a little late with our christmas letter but we hope that you stille appreciate getting a greeting and some news from us even though it’s not in time.

So we hope that you have all had a terrific christmas, and we wish you a very good year 2008.

This year we have not gone on exciting travels abroad. We left this task for the children – Mathias went to Nice in France for three weeks in order to learn French and Thomas went 6 weeks to Mongolia with the scouts. We stayed at home or went to Sweden to our “farm”.

In Sweden there´s always work to do. We had a new storm that knocked down a lot of trees in our “forest” and we emptied the well in order to get new fresh water into it. We and our co-owners have finished the scout log shelter, we have renovated the toilet and started building a bathroom.

In spring Mathias had his confirmation and all our old IAAS-friends came to help us build a “party-house” on our terrace. We were more than 50 persons for the party – the family keeps growing, and we had friends (René, Cecilie and Lene) and neighbours (Cecilies mother) in the kitchen. It’s very good to have good friends.

In autumn we pulled down a very tall tree (about 15 m) in the garden. We had to cut it down in small pieces so that it wouldn’t fall onto our different garden houses. Susanne tried to climb up in order to cut of the top, but she only managed 1 m above the latter which is 7 m tall – then she got scared. Then we sent the children up, but then we got scared of losing the children. At the end we bought some special climbing tools so that the children could tie themselves to the tree and then everything went well.

In August we went to visit Ana Soveral Dias and her family in Norway. Ana and Ivar have got some very nice twin-girls that were almost starting to crawl all over the house.

The status of the children is as follows:

Kirstine (12) is becoming more and more of a teenager. She constantly needs new clothes and she hates to get good advices from her parents. She still plays hand ball (goal keeper) and she is a scout.

Mathias (15) has started going out with friends – and we are some times quite worried about what he’s doing, but so far we don’t think that he has been in any trouble – but what do parents know?

Thomas (17) is still a scout and still in gymnasium. He has been spending quite som time on writing a chess programme for the internet, see http://pychess.googlepages.com/home.

The status of the parents:

We both have got new jobs from February 1^st 2008. Per is going to work with substitutes for organic farmers. Susanne is going to work with taxes.

Per is becoming more and more of a hunter and hunts with Susannes father, with our neighbours in Sweden and at Karstens farm. However, he doesn’t shoot a lot – this year only 2 pheasants, but it is very nice to be outdoors and enjoy nature.

Finally the short news: Of course we went to the canoe-trip and some of the canoes turned around and people got wet (not us). Pers sister got her third child and finally got married. We bought new chicken in September that we had in the house until they were “teenagers”. They were very cute when they were small.

Love,

Susanne and Per